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When Senate leaders said a bill allowing businesses to refuse service to gay couples wouldn’t go forward until it passed muster with several groups including the state's LGBT community, it sounded like a major philosophical shift within the solidly Republican Kansas Legislature.

After all, the bill had just sailed through the House despite the protests of Tom Witt and the Kansas Equality Coalition, the state's main gay-rights lobbying organization.

But Witt says stopping that bill in the Senate — with a major assist from the state's business community — was the culmination of years of groundwork by he and other advocates. They now want to build on that work to add discrimination protections for gay, lesbian and transgender Kansans into the state law.

Witt was formally hired to lobby in 2005 after working as a volunteer in the gay community's biggest legislative defeat, the state's constitutional amendment defining marriage as between one man and one woman. Since then his group has successfully fended off bills that it believes discriminate against homosexual Kansans — lesser-publicized wins leading up to this year's nationally known victory.

After years of playing defense, Witt and the coalition say it is time to balance the legal playing field.

"There may be areas in statute that can be clarified or perhaps strengthened to protect religious liberties," Witt told a legislative committee last week. "We would support those efforts, with two conditions: the discriminatory language of previous bills is not part of that discussion, and that sexual orientation and gender identity be included in the Kansas Act Against Discrimination."

In requesting the addition of sexual orientation and gender identity to the state's nondiscrimination law, Witt's group is building on public awareness created by the battle over the "denial-of-service" provisions in House Bill 2453.

Much of the opposition to that bill centered on fears of "No Gays Allowed" business policies similar to segregation-era "Jim Crow" laws.

But Witt says owners of private businesses in Kansas are already allowed to have such policies because homosexuality and gender identity aren’t protected classes in the state's nondiscrimination statutes.

“I don’t know that a lot of people understand that,” Witt said.

The major changes in HB 2453, he said, were to allow government employees to deny services and to protect individual private-sector employees who deny services to gay couples against their employers' wishes — a change to the state's "at-will" employment law that spurred the business community's opposition.

Witt said he hears from gay Kansans denied service by private businesses about once or twice a year. Reports of Kansans getting fired or kicked out of their rental homes based on sexual orientation are more common.

"Discrimination is real in the state of Kansas," Witt said. "People do lose their jobs for being gay and lesbian in the state. People do get evicted.”

Right now those Kansans have no legal recourse, he said, except in a few select cities that have included sexual orientation in local nondiscrimination ordinances.

Witt counts blocking legislative proposals that would have weakened those ordinances as some of the victories his group has won since 2005.

Witt says he is serious about adding sexual orientation and gender identity to the state's nondiscrimination statutes despite the socially conservative makeup of the Legislature.

An information hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee last week suggested that would inflame concerns about religious liberty. Sen. Mary Pilcher-Cook, R-Shawnee, asked about the case of a New Mexico photographer sued for refusing to work a gay wedding, and Sen. Forrest Knox, R-Altoona, said a Catholic adoption agency in Illinois faced sanctions for its policies on serving gay couples.

Both of those states have nondiscrimination clauses that include sexual orientation and gender identity, according to the ACLU.

Helen Alvare, a professor at George Mason University who spoke at last week's hearing, said gay marriage is likely to be imposed on Kansas by courts soon and the state should move to protect citizens whose Judeo-Christian beliefs are incompatible with participation in such services.

"It means so much more than the freedom to live one's own marriage according to religious beliefs, to the point that asking religious citizens to facilitate or cooperate with a same-sex marriage is like asking them to practice another religion," Alvare said.

The Kansas Family Policy Council, The Church of God in Christ and the Kansas Catholic Conference joined Alvare's call for more religious conscience protections.

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Liberals want "freedom from religion", "separation of church and state" and all that, but want to use the state to restrict freedom of religion, which imposes the state upon the church...which ain't "separation of".

Liberals are intolerant hypocrites. It's ALL their way...or no way. Reasonable compromise and tolerance is not an option with these yahoos.

If homosexuality and transgenderness is included in anti-discrimination statutes, what possible protection could be provided to religious people? NONE. This is a deception. People like Tom Witt have no respect for the religious beliefs of others. Only that people accept his "sexual identity". People like him agree with President Obama that the 1st Amendment is about "freedom of worship"...not freedom of religion. Freedom of religion 24/7 365.

Why do you make this about "liberals"? It isn't about religion or theory. Their fight is existential. Those who are discriminated against in public life rightfully feel threatened in their lives. This is about survival, not some political philosophy. They will fight until they win, because their right to exist and be safe is at stake. You would, too. No surrender. No compromise. Take no prisoners. Freedom, security, and civil rights is what they demand and will have. You are not understanding that, because you are unable to put yourself in their shoes. Once you do, you will discover that you have misunderstood completely. And if you read the article carefully, you will see that these same people are just as determined to protect religious liberty, and for the same reason. If a person can have their opportunities, freedom, and civil rights removed on the basis of their religion, then nobody is safe. Nobody. The people you so dismissively criticize are fighting for you, as well.

joined (Helen) Alvare's call for more religious conscience protections."

People of faith and conscience (and even those of no label), generally don't take their constitutional religious freedoms seriously until they've actually seen it removed or truncated in their own situations, their own businesses, their own church or congregation, their own congregation-related colleges or businesses, their own corner of the marketplace of ideas.

Only then do they realize (1) that it was important to take a stand, and (2) that they're not going to get that religious freedom back once it's lost.

But kudos to the above groups, and also Prof. Helen Alvare, for making the effort to speak out and speak up while there is time. They understand that all PEOPLE are created equal, but all BEHAVIORS are not created equal.

(In case readers are wondering, The Church of God in Christ is a predominately black denomination, the fifth largest Christian denomination in the U.S. They reject any attempt to piggyback gay marriage onto the coattails of the black civil rights struggle.)

Most of the writers above wrongly contend that one is either gay or religious. That one is either liberal or religious. That is a false choice. Liberals are as religious as anyone. There are many gay Christians. This is not about protecting our religious freedoms. Gay people do not threaten my faith. My faith is attacked when in the name of "Christianity", supposed people of faith choose to try and make another group of citizens into a second class.

There were many compromises on the way to gender and ethnic freedoms. Remember when blacks were 3/5th a person?
The difference is the Christian right still views homosexuality as a moral issue. The government has unmoralized (is that a word?) laws that tend to pertain to religious beliefs (such as abortion and adultery), but most of those don't force anything upon the God-fearing. Now, gays and lesbians are trying not only to change the law, but force a change of belief systems on a group that was brought up to detest the indecencies of homosexual sex.
You bet this will take time and compromise.

This is not about religious freedom at all. If it was, then the law would include being able to discriminate against adulterers, liars, and all sinners. It would not single out just one "sin". Since it does focus on one "sin", it is simply about legalized discrimination and we should not compromise in stopping it. What is your compromise, coffee? If someone is gay you can discriminate 3/5 of the time? What a joke! Isn't this simply trying to force one system of religious beliefs by law on the state? Our forefathers must be rolling over in their graves. Just give it up and call it what it is ---bigotry. And nothing that Christians should be attempting to pass against their neighbors.

If this was a Hegemony, then the "superior" class could dictate what others are to believe, but this is a Constitutional Republic, which clearly states in the The Equal Protection Clause which is located at the end of Section 1 of the Fourteenth Amendment:

"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

Hiding behind one's religion in order to break the 14th Amendment, might work elsewhere, but if want the law to protect you, then you must respect the rights of others to be protected.

I did not endorse or renounce gay rights. I simply responded to dfwguy who seemed to reject any notion of a compromise. Reread my post and you will understand. If you know your history you will know that the 3/5th compromise was around 1780. It would be another 80 years before we fought a war over slavery and another hundred and fifty years before I will be censured for using the N word. I can write negro, colored, black, and African-American, but if I write n***** this post will be deleted. Change takes time.
You want to change an entire generation of God-fearing people who find this whole affair disgusting, yet you care not for their respective position.
My point is it will take time for this whole issue to manifest itself and a conclusion reached.

But don't hold your breath waiting for the majority of Americans to fight a war endorsing gay rights. Another civil war with hundreds of thousands of lives lost will not occur for this matter.

Yet another religious fanatic representative from Kansas wants a law respecting religion's right to hate on certain people.....Oh, how Christian we are in Kansas......Praise the Lord....sometimes??? Nah...Jesus loves us All Equallly!